Hot Trends reflects what people are searching for on Google today. Rather than showing the most popular searches overall, which would always be generic terms like "weather," Hot Trends highlights searches that have sudden surges in popularity. Our algorithm analyzes millions of web searches performed on Google and displays those searches that deviate the most from their historic traffic pattern. The algorithm also filters out spam and removes inappropriate material.

For each search, Hot Trends shows related searches, a search-volume graph, and the top cities. We also display news, blog, and web results to help give context about why a search may be appearing on the Hot Trends list today. Hot Trends is updated hourly. You can also choose a date in the past to see what the top Hot Trends for that date were.

8. The "New birthdays!" notification basically shows me any and all birthdays, past, present, and future, within a half-month radius. Today it showed me Scott's birthday, which was about 10 days ago, CK Chung's birthday, which was December 12, and my friend Kevin's birthday, which was December 11. It wouldn't surprise me if my friends are getting a "New birthday!" notification informing them that mine is just around the corner on August 6th.

I dig the theme/day idea... (sucks that everytime I use "dig" now, I have to think if people are gonna think I mean "Digg")

Sucks for Frank & Scott. My experience at the Wynn was quite pleasant, but I did realize that I needed to pull on my door quite hard for it to lock (kinda like when your car door is partially latched, but not shut all the way, so you have to push your ass against it).

Not to mention, it seriously took me like 10 minutes to figure out how to open the door in the first place...

I was thinking about entering, anyway, just for the camaraderie... and one of them pimp-ass shirts. I'm just hesitant because I suck-ass at poker (even though I'm Asian) and I'm curious as to what else is gonna be going on around town. However, a free seat would be a no-brainer!

Welcome, Si... and great post! I love stuff like this. Sometimes, when I try to explain the more complex elements like the PageRank formula, my attempt to clarify things often leads me to go in circles and end up confusing everyone, including myself. Your explanation coupled with the diagrams make it very easy to follow. Looking forward to your future posts!

There's a slew of us in the OC that meet up every once in awhile... though they are the "what are you doing tonight?" or "wanna come over and bbq?" type meet-ups. I may have some time in a few months to organize something a little more pre-planned... we'll see!

Rand, that really sucks-ass. However, I'm sure it's a good lesson learned for you and a fair warning to all of us to be prepared for the worst.

I've never had my laptop stolen... but in college, I had one never turn on again. It happened to have my completed final paper that was due the next week. After bashing the laptop to bits, I've learned to back up the files on my computer to an external hard drive. You've just reminded me to do it more frequently!

I also store a lot of files online. This would have been a good idea for your presentation. I've found AOL's Xdrive to be very useful for this.

Like tao83, I was getting pinged by headhunters almost daily through LinkedIn at the beginning of the year. Answering questions also seems to attract a lot of interest to your profile.

As for SEO purposes, linking out to your own stuff from these types of sites is nice, but the parasitic SEO aspect for reputation management or vanity search optimization purposes is also nice, as well.

I've had the pleasure of rubbing elbows and becoming friends with the biggest names in the industry... but I consider the conversations and freindships made with search marketers that I didn't know of before, equally valuable.

Oatmeal, this is Kid Disco. Don't know if you heard of me or not, but I'm really cool and there is a problem with your tool. It works great Oatmeal, but it doesn't check search engines other than Google, like Yahoo and Search With Kevin.

Just a helpful hint, it doesn't return results from Google.co.uk and there are a bunch of other very specific features that it doesn't do that I want it to do.

If you are going to release the source code, you should also have an extensive tutorial for those of us who do not know what PHP and HTML is.

Oh, and the tool doesn't work because it says my exotic plants site isn't in the top 100 for poker.

Shouldn't it be here comes three Mozzers, either way you guys will be missed to say the least.

Thinker, are you British? Because I think American English and British English handle this differently. In British English, groups (teams, companies, clubs) are plural, while in American English, they are singular.

So, the British would say "here comes three Mozzers," while Americans say "here come three Mozzers."

We've implemented an open source portal application, called Geeklog, as our "client extranet" where we upload and store deliverables for our clients. It's pretty sweet and has worked out well.
As for project management, I have developed a highly technical system using post-it-notes.

In the case of Moving Content or Shifting from an Old Domain to a New Domain, what do you think about using 302 re-directs from the old pages to the corresponding new URLs while #3 and #4 are done and some equity is built up before switching to 301?

I think you should note that the search engines don't always display the description you write in your meta.
Inserting the NOODP tag should also be in the SEO's checklist if the ODP info is not desired in the big 3's SERPs, which seems to be the case for Andreoni.com.

Wow. Great writeup! I doubt there is anyone else that has experienced a steeper learning curve over the early stages of their SEO education than you have. You're so lucky to be among the company of SEOs that you are in!
When does SEOmoz' internship program begin? :P

I'm also impressed by the AI...
Interestingly enough, she got stuck for me too on "Who is Mickey Mouse?" so I closed her before she could crash my computer.
I added some more info and a few more fun queries on my blog...

Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. I don't know much at all about the stock market, but it looks like GOOGs stock went up a couple of points after the deal was announced:
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=google
A couple points means a couple billion dollars for Google, so basically they made money by buying YouTube...

Hey Rand, the "Incompetent People Have No Clue" isn't linked correctly... I found a copy of the article on SFGate.com and found it interesting enough to pass it on to others. Just want to make sure your readers can do the same!